Show Summary

This is episode #422, and my guest today is Cherif Medawar.

Cherif is a member of my Investor Fuel real estate mastermind, and when he first joined and shared some of the things he does in real estate, he blew the minds of some of America’s most successful investors.

It’s rare that we talk about a topic on this show that hasn’t come up before, after 422 episodes, but today is one of those episodes. Cherif is going to share with us how to flip commercial properties for big profits. The concept is just as easy to understand as wholesaling residential properties, except your profits may have more commas and zeros!

We all drive past vacant commercial properties…probably every single day. We sometimes forget that the owners of those commercial properties may be suffering from some of the same issues that traditional home owners have. Divorce, health issues or financial issues. They may have had a very long term tenant in the property previously that had a triple net lease, and the landlord didn’t have to do anything. But now that the tenant is gone, they may have absolutely no idea what to do next.

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FlipNerd Show Transcript:

Mike:This is the flipnerd.com Expert Real Estate Investing Show. The show for real estate investors whether you’re a veteran or brand new. I’m your host Mike Hambright, and each week I bring you a new expert guest that will share their knowledge and lessons with you. If you’re excited about real estate investing, believe in personal responsibility, and taking control of your life and financial destiny, you’re in the right place.
This is episode number 422 and my guest today is Cherif Medawar. Cherif is a member of my Investor Fuel Real Estate Mastermind and when he first joined and shared some of the things that he does in real estate, he blew the minds of some of America’s most successful investors, some pretty incredible stuff.
We could have talked about a lot of different things today, but today’s topic is a good one. In fact, it’s rare that we talk about a topic on this show that hasn’t come up before after 422 episodes, but today just happens to be one of those times. Cherif is going to share with us how to flip commercial properties for big profits. The concept is really just as easy to understand as wholesaling residential properties on to rehabbers or even landlords except only your profits may have more commas and zeros.
We all drive past vacant commercial properties probably every single day. We sometimes forget that the owners of those commercial properties are not as sophisticated as you might think, not always. They may be suffering from some of the same issues that traditional homeowners have that we talked about on the show all the time. Death, divorce, inheritance or financial issues might be a few of those things.
They may have had a very long-term tenant in the property previously that had a triple net lease and the landlord had to do almost nothing to maintain that. But now when that big national tenant has gone, they may have absolutely no idea what to do next and may be struggling not that much differently than a single family home owner might be. I don’t want to steal our thunder here, it’s a great show. Let’s go ahead and get started. Please help me welcome Cherif Medawar to the show. Hey, Cherif, welcome to the show.
Cherif:Hey, thank you. How are you?
Mike:Good, good. We’re so excited to have you here. I’m excited for our listeners to meet you if they don’t know you yet because you’re a member of our mastermind Investor Fuel and when you got up and talked last time in front of the room, I think you blew a bunch of minds as to, you know, sometimes we talk . . . I ask my wife this all the time, “Am I thinking too small? Am I thinking, you know, should we up our thinking? Should we think bigger so we do bigger things?” And you’re doing bigger things, my friend, so excited to talk to you some more today.
Cherif:Thank you. Thank you, Mike.
Mike:Hey, so for everybody that’s listening right now, I want to steal our thunder, we’re going to be talking about flipping commercial properties. We’ve never talked about this, 422 episodes. We’ve never really talked a whole lot about commercial properties at all, let alone flipping them much like wholesalers do single family houses. Fascinating topic, so before we dive in, Cherif, why don’t you introduce yourself and tell us about your background and your past, how you got started.
Cherif:Yes, thank you. Well, my name is Cherif Medawar and I’ve been in the educational business training people on real estate for almost 20 years now. Mainly my events are done in California, sometimes I do New York and Florida. And basically I’ve been lucky enough to work hard in a hotel. I wanted to be a hotel manager and I met a billionaire in the name of Edmond Baysari, when I was in my early 20s. And he saw how hard that was working at a hotel called Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles, and he asked me to work for him.
So I went to work for him for about eight years from almost . . . I was in my 20s all the way to age 28. And when I left him, I had that much knowledge. I mean, just incredible amount of knowledge and credit. I didn’t have cash. So when I left him, I just said, “Okay, I’m going to start flipping homes,” and I started in Southern California and I was doing some hotel work and flipping homes and built my portfolio. Then I realized I can do more, a lot better, a lot faster with commercial. So that’s when my life really took off to another level totally.
Mike:Yeah, that’s awesome. And now tell us a little bit about your investing now. I know you own a lot of properties in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico and tell us a little bit more about your holdings and your kind of some of your current real estate investing.
Cherif:Okay, great. Well, so I was flipping a lot of properties in California, because in California, the flipping is a lot easier since you have a lot of demand. So I would buy the properties, rehab them and sell them and I would do training showing people how to do it. And then in 2009, when the economy had dropped, the students had asked me, “Hey, what if I just give you the money and you do it for me?” So I said, “Great.” I set up a fund, filed it to the SEC, became a fund manager, and I started raising capital from my students and deploying the capital into higher end properties. We were flipping $10 million homes in Pacific Heights.
Mike:Oh, wow.
Cherif:Yeah, it’s amazing. It’s just that, you do the same work and it’s a lot less risk, believe it or not, because you just . . . let’s say you take a property that’s 3000 square feet in Pacific Heights, San Francisco area, you add a couple thousand square feet for $500 square foot. But then when you flip it, you’re getting $2500 per square foot. So you make $3, $4 million on a deal. Actually risk is, believe it or not, lower because, you know, you can force appreciation with things.
I started making so much money. What brought me to Puerto Rico was a lot of the tax incentives exist in the U.S. territories. I wanted [inaudible 00:05:39] my taxes legally, I realized that have to be based in Puerto Rico. I applied for a tax reduction with the government. It’s a special tax incentive and I dropped my tax for less than practically 15% a year. From 50, 5-0, to 15, 1-5. I think that’s when I started reinvesting so it just grew very fast. I’m now the largest single owner of historic properties in the U.S., believe it or not.
Mike:Wow. Wow. Awesome. Awesome. So let’s talk a little bit about flipping commercial properties and that’s what we’re going to talk about today. For guests, for those that are listening right now it’s, we always have this issue, not always, but often we have this issue, Cherif and I talked up front. We came up with like four or five different topics we could talk about today. Saving taxes, he’s become a master at minimizing your tax bill and all sorts of other things. And what we decided to talk about is flipping commercial property, very fascinating. And it’s really . . . it sounds like it’s very similar to what a lot of us do, maybe what a lot of you listening right now already know how to do with residential. So go ahead, tell us a little bit about what that is, Cherif, and then let’s kind of dive in.
Cherif:Okay, great. You know, there are so many different type of commercial properties. I mean, really, there are 12 different types, but the one that I prefer most and I actually created a joint venture with the students and other investors is the following strategy. It’s finding single tenant buildings. These are the standalone buildings where you have a Jack in The Box, Starbucks, you know, those are the standalone buildings. And what I tell my investors, students who want to work with me, you know, I have the fund set up, it’s called MIGSIF and there is a lot of cash in the fund at all times. And what I do is, I like to find these buildings anywhere in the country, if they’re vacant.
So I tell the students, “Hey, find a single tenant vacant building and let’s put it under contract.” So if it’s worth $1 million when it’s occupied, when it’s vacant, it’s going to sell around $600 or so. Why? There is no income. And maybe the owner is even having payments. So it’s so much easier to negotiate a good price, put it under contract and then you have the opportunity . . . I give the students a list of 4000 national tenants. These are big companies that are looking to expand. We’ve already done the homework, we compile the list, give them the phone numbers, who to contact. And then I train people what to say and that all they do is, “Hi, I got this property at 123 El Camino Real. It’s 2000 square feet on the first floor. There is 500 square feet on the second floor for storage or in the back area for storage. The neighboring tenants are Starbucks and Jamba Juice and if you’re interested, I’m going to send you an email with a video.”
And then I have these students do a little video of the place, compose an email, and send it to each tenant that they talk to, that they leave a message to you. And all we need really is one tenant to call back. And let’s say that tenant is . . . I don’t know, let’s say it’s Jack in The Box. Jack in The Box calls and say, “We’re very interested,” let’s say it’s Quiznos because we have Quiznos growing like crazy right now. So Quiznos would call and say, “Yeah, we’re very interested. We have franchisees that want to come into that location. Tell us about the numbers.”
So now they get me on a conference call and I’m able to discuss with the tenant, the potential tenant the details of what is called a Letter of Intent. The name of the company, how long they’re going to lease it for, what is the lease amount, how many months free rent they want for what’s called tenant improvement, all these details that I actually train the students on. I negotiate the deal. Once we have a deal happening, they just assign the deal for me. That deal they put under contract at $600,000 becomes worth a million dollars with the tenant coming in. There’s an instant increase in value of 300,000 to 600,000 on these deals.
Mike:If you’re an active real estate investor already doing deals and looking to double or triple your business, you should consider joining the Investor Fuel Real Estate Investor Mastermind. We’re a small group of investors that share our best practices, tips, and tricks with one another in effort to all win. We limit our membership to only one to two members per market, so everyone shares their knowledge, tips, and tricks openly and honestly.
Our members include some buying one to two houses a month. Up to some of the most respected investors and leaders in the real estate investing industry. Some of which have personally done over 1000 deals. If you’d like to be considered for our invitation-only, world-class mastermind, please visit investorfuel.com to request your personal invitation. Our next meeting is coming up quickly, go to investorfuel.com now to learn more.
Cherif: . . . deal happening, they just assign the deal for me. That deal they put under contract at $600,000 becomes worth $1 million with the tenant coming in. There’s an instant increase in value of $300,000 to $600,000 on these deals.
Mike:Wow.
Cherif:Yeah. I know I’m kind of going over something that I train a whole day . . .
Mike:Yeah, yeah. No, we always have that issue on the show as we’re going to talk about something for 30 minutes. The point is we talked about this recently is, I recently had somebody on where we talked about apartment buildings, right? And I think there’s this myth that a lot of us have, a lot of real estate investors, a lot of people have is that if it’s a corporate-owned property, then it must be efficient, right? They must be running it efficiently. Somebody is making good choices behind there.
But the fact of the matter is there are individuals that own buildings like that, right? That might have health issues. They might be going through a divorce. They might have a lot of the same things that single family distressed sellers have. They have things going on in their life. Life is getting in the way. And they are not . . . they might be somebody that bought the property many years ago when it had 10 or 15 or 20-year lease in it. But then over time, they just got lazy that when that tenant moved out, they really didn’t know what to do. It’s just sitting there, right? They’re not as efficient as an average person would think.
Cherif:Yes. And even if they’re not . . . You see, you have two different distressed situations in the real estate business. You have an owner who is distressed and that person may be going through a divorce, illness of some sort, relocation, job loss, financial problems, etc., etc. Or you can have what’s called a property that’s distressed. It needs rehab. It needs this, this.
The situation with single tenant vacant buildings, it’s really the building is in good condition. It was used by a good national tenant before or a good tenant operating there but you have an owner who is really in trouble because they don’t know how to bring tenants. And when these type of owners call brokers, the broker says, “Well, let me sell it for you,” because the commission is bigger on the sale than get just the whatever, 3% or whatever on a lease.
So there is a conflict, if you will, with how they can handle the situation. And they don’t know how to do it. Nobody really . . . I’ve seen no one in the country training people on how to bring a big national tenants into these locations. You make the phone call, you get one tenant, and Mike, you don’t have to worry about it for 10, 15 years.
Mike:Right, right.
Cherif:I mean, I have a portfolio of these properties. I don’t have to do anything because the tenant signs with you, what’s called the triple net lease. [inaudible 00:13:08] is net of the tax, insurance, and maintenance.
Mike:Yep. And that previous owner got kind of lazy because it was a triple net lease, they didn’t have to do anything. And then when they had to do something, they didn’t know what the heck to do, right?
Cherif:Yeah, exactly, exactly.
Mike:I get it. I get it. I have some friends that worked for Yum Brands, a very large company, lots of restaurants. And they literally were, you know, assigned to an area of the country and their whole job was to find locations. Like a lot of these big companies have like real estate people that are out trying to find future locations, right?
Cherif:Yes, yes. It would be great to connect with somebody that is finding locations for big tenants. Actually right now one of my students who took the training, was making one phone call in North Carolina with Dunkin’ Donuts. And the next thing you know he clicked with Dunkin’ Donuts representative from the real estate department and now we’re going to do four locations. And how awesome this? One phone call for one location. He’s going to do four deals.
The students get paid when they find a deal at say, $600. And now they line up the tenant that’s going to come in and he’s got to make the property worth a million because once you sign the lease, the property value jumps. And I come in and I buy that $600. I pay the students on that difference of upside. I pay 10% to 25% of the upside. So just making a few phone calls this version will make from $40,000 to $100,000 referral fee.
Mike:That’s awesome. That’s awesome. And you’re teaching students how to do this and if they need somebody with deep pockets, you have access to your fund to go finance these at what you put in the fund and keep them long term, right?
Cherif:Exactly. Well, the idea is, I give them the proof of funds letter, several millions, so when they make an offer on the property they say, “I am presenting the MIGSIF fund and Cherif Medawar.” They send the proof of fund that I give them, and the brokers call me to confirm. I sign off on it and we put the deal under contract. Then they, the student, makes the phone calls and follows up. They [learn off 00:15:08] one tenant. All we need is one tenant.
Mike:Yep. And they’re effectively playing the role of a wholesaler, and they’re wholesaling to you, right? It’s the same thing we do in single family. It’s just with commercial properties, more commas and zeros.
Cherif:Exactly. And actually no downside to be honest because if the student cannot line up somebody in the 45 days when they have the deal under contract, you realize the student has no obligation to purchase the property. It’s under due diligence period. It’s a contingency period. And that’s by law, they don’t even have to negotiate that. We get 45 days. So if they can’t find a tenant within the first 30, 35 days, we can just walk away. There is absolutely no downside, if they put 5,000, 10,000 in escrow, they get that money refunded, the earnest money deposit period.
Mike:Yeah. And you can do that in residential too. Of course, what I always teach people is, “Don’t do that,” because, you know, with somebody that’s a homeowner is, you know, you could put in what we call a termination option, right? You could terminate the contract, but a lot of home owners are if they’re living in the house, or they’ve inherited the house, you know, we like to bring closure to them. So I say, “Look, don’t ever mislead somebody and go back and terminate the contract. They didn’t even know that was going to happen.” But that just so happens in commercial that’s normal, right? To have that due diligence period.
Cherif: Standard. Exactly. If I’m selling you a property, I have to give you access to the property for 30 to 45 days to do your due diligence. It’s just standard in the business. And usually we’re able to pull it through. It’s we’re not the student didn’t make calls or they didn’t follow through or something. But then they get their money back and they learn, they get better with time.
Mike: Yep, yep. And I would encourage people to listen to this right now. It’s fascinating, right? As we were talking here, I was thinking about . . . I went to lunch today with my wife. I’ll just tell you we went to Chick-fil-A. We like Chick-fil-A. And we were driving back and I noticed . . . this is near my office. So we drive around here a lot. There was a KFC that was in a building that’s closed down. It’s just sitting there. And there’s a couple buildings like that that pop up. We all see them where we live. It’s these buildings that a big tenant moves out and probably creates a potential opportunities, like you’re talking about here is somebody needs to move in there but the person that owns that property might have no idea what to do next.
Cherif: Exactly. And the value itself is different than the price. See, the price is the building replacement cost, if you will. The value is you bring a tenant that’s going to sign 10 to 15 year lease, right? And that’s the opportunity is finding these deals and talking to the broker or the seller directly and saying, “I need to put it under a contract and I’m going to do this and that.” And they say, “Well, that’s great. Why not? I want to sell it.”
Mike: Yep, yep. So to give an analogy, you’re teaching people how to play the role of a wholesaler, find the opportunities. You teach them how to find the opportunities. And then wholesale it to you which you basically are, like, turnkey rental operator, right? But they’re just commercial properties and you pay for them through a fund where you raise money.
Cherif: That’s correct.
Mike: Awesome. Awesome. But the wholesaler gets to make much bigger numbers than they typically would with single family?
Cherif: Yes because this spread is so much bigger. I mean, seriously, one deal can change your life. I’ve had students that found the deal and then realized they can do it themselves. I mean, literally, when you have the deal under contract, let’s say at 600,000 and you have a tenant coming in with a letter of intent, you go to the bank and you say, “Look, I can buy this property. Here it is under contract for 600,000.” And I got a tenant coming in like Subway or Quiznos or Ben & Jerry’s where the corporate guarantee . . . they’re going to guarantee the lease for 10, 15 years. That corporate guarantee is worth $800 million to a billion dollars. They’re publicly traded.
And you tell the bank, “I need a loan to buy this property.” Guess what? The bank says, “Great. I’ll give you the loan.” “Oh, but my company is not the . . . ” “We don’t care. Just assign the lease to the bank.” And the bank files what’s called a UCC-1 filing against the property for the actual lease. So somebody even bankrupt can qualify for loans on these.
There is just so much potential that it changed my life. I mean, we’re doing a deal right now and I’m buying the property at $2.5 million. This is a little bit bigger deal. The day I closed the property, literally a week later, we’re going to sign the lease three days later with Adidas downstairs, etc. The deal is going to jump to $4 million. I mean, it would take somebody maybe a lifetime to make one and a half million. That’s one deal.
Mike: Right. Right.
Cherif: I found. You know, I mean, I can only be in so many places at the same time. So I work with students and it’s so easy because you as an individual, like me, I don’t have to do a lot of due diligence. The due diligence is done by the tenants. So we [inaudible 00:19:50] contract. The tenant tells us what they want. I negotiate with the tenant the terms and then the deal is done. [inaudible 00:19:55] deal and walk away.
Mike:If folks want to find these deals, I’m trying to kind of always tie it back to like single family, because that’s what we talked about so much here on the show. Does it take a lot of money to get started doing this? I mean, we could all drive around and find properties, but does it really take a lot of money? You have to generally put down . . . when you sign a contract, what do you typically have to pay down for deposits or earnest money?
Cherif: Okay, so you can put 1% to 3% of the property value. So this is what is typical. So let’s say the property is $600,000 since that’s the number I was working with, the broker may say, “Listen, I need you to put $15,000 down.” Let’s say that’s what the broker says, earnest money deposit. What I have taught my students and we’ve done it consistently is to say, “Okay, let me put $5,000 now to open escrow, you know, just to write the contract and then when I removed the contingencies, I will add another $15,000 or $20,000,” or whatever is needed. Because all we need to do is show consideration and show that we’re serious.
So the student I asked him to put that $5,000 in. It’s not at risk because we have the due diligence period. And once we structure the deal with a tenant, I’m able to step in to pay because we buy all cash from my fund directly, and the student gets back their earnest money deposit plus the upside. We do it all at the closing through the HUD-1 where it shows I’m buying the building 600. Students made, let’s say 100,000 signing fee and they get back their earnest money deposit. I pay the closing and now the property is purchased by me all cash. I sign the lease with the tenant and then I decide usually within a year we refinance it, cash out, or we turn around and sell it for more.
Mike: Sure. Sure. Cherif, I guess this can be done anywhere, right? Anywhere in the country?
Cherif: Anywhere in the country. So I tell the students you should have at least like $5,000 to $10,000 cash to be able to put as earnest money deposit that you get back. It’s not at risk, number one. Number two, I tell students work in your own backyard, within the three to five-mile radius. You don’t need to go look somewhere else. I mean, I had people tell me, “Well, I’m in North Dallas. I don’t see a lot of activities here.” Well, let me ask you. “Is there a McDonald’s?” “Yeah.” “Is there a Burger King?” “Yeah.” “Do you have a Jamba Juice.” “Yes.” People eat everywhere, you know?
Mike: So what tends to be some of the better areas? Is it more of the areas that are a little bit more run down or up and coming area. Some of the up and coming areas, you know, if you know Dallas specifically, just for example, when you go out on the outskirts, everything seems to be new, it’s probably not as much. Like houses, right? Like we don’t buy a lot of houses as real estate investors in newer areas because they just haven’t had a chance to get distressed yet. But there are older parts of town that, you know, they’re a little more transient I guess in terms of big customers moving out, big tenants moving out.
Cherif: Okay, a good question. There are usually 14 criteria that I give the students, “Okay, here’s what we need, the more of the 14 bullet points if already have checked, the better off that property is. But in general, you want a place where you have scarcity of supply, so you have an area where maybe one or two vacant properties. You don’t want a bunch of single tenant vacant because then it’s going to look like the trend is going down. So you want an area that you don’t have a lot of supply of single tenant properties. You want good neighboring tenants. You want good traffic.
You want a trend that is on the steady upswing. And the beauty is when you have good neighboring tenants . . . I mean, just take this example, if you have Dunkin’ Donuts and Starbucks and you have an empty space in the middle that’s a standalone building, I mean, Jamba Juice right there, they will pay even more per square foot than the comparable square foot rent in the area because they want to be there because they know they sell more next to Starbucks. These are the opportunities we see.
Mike: Yeah. Yeah. So what are some of the downsides? Like what could go wrong in this business? What are some of the fine print we haven’t talked about yet?
Cherif: Okay, so what can go wrong is somebody just finds a property, puts it under contract, puts the $5,000 and not make enough calls. So they actually just wasted their time. They did not make enough calls. They did not follow up on the tenants that were interested or expressed interest. But in terms of financial risk, really there is none if they follow exactly the steps we give them because by law the earnest money deposit has to be refunded because you have so many days and we are tracking that with them, etc.
But it’s just a lot of time and effort. I mean, it sounds simpler than it is because there is a lot of follow up. In the beginning we call it, say on the first day you call 10 tenants. The next day you’re following up with those 10 and you’re calling 10 new ones. So it kind of compounds on itself. So if somebody’s organized and, you know, I tell my students just call five tenants a day and then grow from there.
Mike: Okay. And national companies like that, big tenants, they have no problem with effectively an assignment fee, right? Like they know that you don’t own it yet, but you will prior to closing. Effectively, I guess you’re doing . . . well, you’re basically just trying to find them to sign a lease, right? They’re never purchasing. Yeah.
Cherif: They don’t care actually. They don’t even care who owns it. They just want to know if the location is going to give them the money they want, the returns they want based on the type of business they have. What they do is they actually they say, “Okay, you know, we’re interested, but this is what we’re going to pay.” And what we do is they say, “Okay, send us the lease so we can sign,” and that’s when we do the closing. And then as an owner on the deed, we just send them the lease. So they’re signing with my fund or with me, etc.
Mike: I see. I see.
Cherif: And one more thing I want to mention about these national tenants. So these national tenants, they want to take the property as is and put it up to their own standards. So there is what’s called tenant improvement. So the negotiation goes in that they say, “Hey, listen, Cherif, we want to get in but, you know, it’s going to cost us $150,000 to get it after standing.” So we’ll say, “Okay, well, we’ll give you two months free rent.” “Oh, give us four.” We settle at three months free rent. That’s three free months period is to help them with the tenant improvement.
But the beauty is I don’t have to do any work. If they do the work, they sign 10 to 15 years. There is a standard escalation clause which is 3%, usually per year. They pay triple net. So the lease is, let’s say, $8,300 a month, which is $100,000 a year, they pay on top of that the property tax, the property insurance, and they maintain the property. So I had no cost. I just put them and I can turn my back and go on to the next deal without any ongoing management.
Mike: And you’re specifically looking for large national companies that you said have a corporate guarantee, right? So even if the store is not doing well, they have to shut it down, they have to continue to pay you?
Cherif: Exactly. These are corporate guarantees that are backed by big banks. Like I had a corporate guarantee that was backed by Wells Fargo Bank. You know, that’s one of the biggest banks in the world. Wells Fargo is one of the biggest four in the country. So you know you’re going to get paid with that. And it’s so easy to get the best loans with the bank when you show them who is the corporate guarantor, etc.
Mike: Yeah, yeah. That’s awesome. I’m just curious in the event that they do move out early, do they just continue to pay you to the end of that term or they usually just pay you a lump sum up front?

Cherif: Okay. So they have . . .
Mike: Or that’s all negotiable I guess, right?
Cherif: Yes. Well, the lease itself, when I write the lease, there is a clause there that I say, “If you do not wish to continue operating, you need to sublease the space.” So now let’s say I had a situation with Puma Corporation, you know Puma?
Mike:Yeah.
Cherif:The sports outfits, etc. Yeah, so in 2009 they said, “Hey, we got a problem because we signed with you but we also signed in a mall and we have a radius restriction.” And they were selling millions of dollars. So they said, “We need out.” I said, “Well, I’m sorry for you, but you haven’t a corporate guarantee. You either continue paying for the nine years left on the lease.”
And that lease was $20,000 a month. That was $240,000 a year with escalations. “So either continue paying me for the nine years or you find another tenant that can pay me equal to or more or you buy the lease. Buy it at a discount.” So there is like X years left at so much time. So they actually elected to pay me $1,000,057 cash, one lump sum, and cashed out. And when we decided that we do that they told me to do we’ll in 90 days. Guess what? I was on the phone calling and I got Crocs to take over their space. Actually, I’m talking to you, Crocs is literally two doors down from the building I’m telling you about. It’s 211 Crystal Street, [also one property 00:28:31]. And Crocs has been there now the past eight years.
Mike: Wow, wow, that’s awesome. That’s awesome. Well, Cherif, I know we just can’t. Guys, we just can’t fit this all into a half hour show, but if folks wanted to learn more . . . and I know you teach a lot on this. I know you have live events and things. But do you have some information online or somewhere they could go to learn more?
Cherif: Yeah, yeah. They can go to “C” like Charlie, “M” like Mary, “R” like Robert, “E” like Edward, “I” like international.com, cmrei.com, which is Cherif Medawar Real Estate Investing. Or they can actually send an email info@cmrei.com and I get a copy of the email. My office gets a copy. I have the education company. We’ve been doing great for 20 years. We have over 2000 video success stories on YouTube. They can just plug in Cherif Medawar.
Mike:Awesome. Awesome. We’ll take some of these links and add them below the show notes. This is exciting because I think, you know, we’re always rooting for the little guy out here. And I think you may have found a way for the little guy to play in the big leagues, right?
Cherif: Yes, absolutely. We’ve had people that . . . I mean, I have a student, she took the training in Fort Lauderdale and, you know, she’s got a little baby girl and she works full time. And she already locked in a deal. Now we have Hertz [SP] Company coming in. I mean, that deal has an upside of $700,000. I mean, her assistant fee will pay off her home. I think that’s exciting.
Mike: Yeah. Yeah. That’s incredible. That’s incredible. Awesome. Hey, thanks for spending time with us today.
Cherif: Thank you so much, Mike. I appreciate your time and I look forward to seeing you at the next event with Investor Fuel.
Mike: And thanks for sharing . . . we’ve never talked about this. I always get excited when I have somebody on the show that we talked about something I’ve never talked about before, because, you know, we’ve almost run out of subjects, but apparently not 100% out.
Cherif: No, not at all.
Mike: Yeah. Awesome. Everybody, thanks for joining us today with Cherif Medawar. This is show number 422. If you haven’t yet, if you’re listening to us on iTunes, Stitcher Radio, Google Play, any of those places, please subscribe and leave us a review. We’d appreciate that. If you listen to us on YouTube or watch us on YouTube., you can subscribe there as well and leave us a review. Of course you can listen to all of our shows and watch all our shows on flipnerd.com. But we appreciate you. Episode 422 is in the bag. We’ll see you on the next episode. Take care.
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